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Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Mother Jones: four ways Tim Cook spins Apple's tax avoidance

Here are two, brought up during today's introduction of two new iPhones:

1. Apple's taxes are straightforward.Spin: "Apple does not use tax gimmicks."Reality: Yet somehow, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, Apple has paid almost no income taxes to any
country on its $102 billion in offshore holdings. Between 2009 and
2012, Apple avoided paying US taxes on some $74 billion in income, an
amount equal to the entire budget of Florida.3. Apple is awesome because it runs huge data centers right here in the United States.Spin: "In 2010, Apple built one of the country's
largest data centers in North Carolina, and it is in the process of
constructing two additional data centers in Oregon and Nevada."Reality: Apple only agreed to build the North Carolina
data center after getting a $46 million state tax break, its local
property taxes halved, and local taxes on its assets slashed by 85
percent—all for creating 50 jobs. To build its data center in
deficit-plagued Nevada, it extracted an $88 million state tax break, the largest in state history.
And Apple chose to build a data center in Prineville, Oregon, because
Oregon has no sales tax and Prineville is in a "rural enterprise zone"
that offers a 15-year property tax exemption.

Maynard (Bob "Gilligan's Island" Denver) slyly flashes a nipple to the CBS eye while trying to talk his best buddy Dobie Gillis (Dwayne Hick­man) into taking off all his clothes. Whoever said 1950s television was a vast waste­land obviously didn't know where to look.